Page 56 of The Resistance Book Club

‘You’ve made it!’ she said, standing aside. ‘Come on in.’

‘Bea first,’ said Anouk. ‘She’ll want a moment.’

‘We closed it up after war,’ Beatrice told them. ‘It didn’t seem right to pack everything away and forget, so we locked the door and left it as a memory. Not a shrine, but a reminder of all that we’d done.’

She swallowed hard, then stepped over the threshold into the cellar. With a gasp, she clasped her hands together, turning to take in the place that she hadn’t seen for decades. Her gaze settled on the message written on the wall and she smiled, before she looked over to the chairs and then the radio.

‘I can’t believe it was me,’ she whispered eventually. ‘All those years ago.’ Then she walked across to the radio and murmured, ‘The Professor sat here and we crowded around, listening for “Clair de Lune” to send us a message.’ The she picked up the yellowing notepad from the table, where a jumble of letters and numbers had been written in a hastypencil long ago. ‘And here’s the last message we took in code, to tell us we were liberated. After this, the messages were in French. Everyone spoke freely after this; the Germans were trying to escape and we went out into the street and pelted the bastards with manure and rotten vegetables and everything we could lay our hands on.’ She chuckled. ‘The lad I ended up married to gave me a broken beer bottle and we went around cutting all the Nazis’ tyres, so they couldn’t get too far before the Allies rolled into the village.’ She tapped her fingernail to the paper and brought the page closer to the candle to illuminate it. ‘You wouldn’t know, but that’s a coded signature. This came from the coders up in Yorkshire, where we had friends.’

‘Oh, I didn’t know there was a link between Cordeval and Yorkshire,’ Lucy said. ‘We did a fashion shoot in Yorkshire a few months ago up there – some lovely old abbey that had something to do with radio or code during the war.’ She wished she’d paid more attention now, but the history had passed her by, as she’d been too busy trying to keep a starlet happy who complained for a hobby.

‘We started the book club just as a quiet little resistance,’ said Beatrice. ‘We only wanted to read the books the Nazis banned, but it didn’t stay that way. Nobody looked at us, you see; we were just women. Mothers and shopkeepers and little girls.’ She gave a devilish wink. ‘What harm can women do, after all?’

Coralie looked at Anouk and said archly, ‘Ask Anouk that the next time she’s off to Paris for one of her protests!’

Anouk nodded. ‘Cordeval women don’t take shit,’ she said with pride. ‘Lucy won’t either; she’s Cordeval, even though she thinks she’s London!’

Lucy laughed along with the others, but it touched her deeply that Anouk thought she was Cordeval too. She wouldn’t have agreed with that when she’d first arrived, but thevillage had pulled her in and shown her that, down in the depths of her heart, she belonged here.

Only, it didn’t suit Lucy’s plans and dreams for her future. If she accepted the promotion, she’d be like the women she admired at airports who wore elegant suits, their phones clamped to their ear as they wheeled a designer suitcase behind them. They’d be headed off to Paris, New York or Milan, a different city every week. She’d have a huge desk with a view across the Thames and the London skyline, and a jump in her wages so that she’d soon be able to afford her own enviable townhouse. Her inbox would be full of invitations to every fancy event going, and she’d live on canapés and champagne.

Most importantly, her father would burst with pride, because it would give her all the success and status that he’d dreamed of for her. It would make all those long working days he’d slogged through, and all that lonely globetrotting, worthwhile. And it would be a reward for Lucy too, for all her hard work.

But the longer Lucy stayed in Cordeval, the further away that life seemed.

She’d loved preparing the cellar for the book club and helping Sébastien in the kitchen, and she was so pleased to see the book club members loading up their plates and tucking in with undisguised delight. It was the sort of food that London fashionistas would run a mile from.

The extraordinary stories that Beatrice and Mémé had put down for Lucy had fascinated her and drawn her in. The more she read about Margot and her friends, the more proud she was that part of her family was from here. And she’d always loved to visit when she was a child. The bookshop, the village, the people…it’d been a warm hug for a little girl who had followed her father around the world.

They took their seats, but no one opened their books yet.Instead, everyone was enthralled by Beatrice’s stories as she told them about the original book club.

As Lucy listened, something changed inside her.

She wanted to stay in Cordeval, and run the bookshop that Mémé had left for her.

And the first thing she’d do was finish putting together the story from the memory box. Somewhere inside it was the key to the secret that Mémé had wanted Lucy to find out. She just had to keep digging into the past…

THIRTY-EIGHT

MARGOT

1941

A few days after that terrifying night, Margot was keeping herself busy, tidying up the shop for half-day closing. Isabelle was asleep upstairs, and Margot kept an ear out for her, ready to run to the baby if she cried, even though Aunt Sandrine was with her. She polished the brass till to a shine, and swept and mopped the wooden floor. All of the books were standing to attention on the shelves, and the cushions in the book-nook were plumped and ready for customers, even though no one had come to the shop for days.

Cordeval had turned into a ghost town and a cold, paralysing fear seemed to hang above its streets. Margot had only seen the occasional huddled figure hurrying past, trying to avoid the SS patrols. There was no drunk laughter coming from Petit’s bar now, and a ‘Closed’ sign hung on the door.

Margot had no idea what’d happened to the rest of her friends after she had shut them into the tunnels. Apart from Aunt Sandrine, who arrived quietly through the garden at the back, no one else had been to see her, and her aunt hadn’tseen anyone either. Margot had decided to keep as close to home as she could, only venturing out to the nearest shop for essentials.

According to the gossips that Margot had overheard on those brief trips, half a dozen members of the resistance had been grabbed during the raid by the SS. Two elderly porters from the glittering hotel in Clarenville-sur-Mer had been snatched by them, alongside the lady who sold shellfish from a brightly painted wooden caravan on the spa town’s quayside. She hadn’t got as far as their cells either, but was hit by one of the bullets that Margot had heard ricocheting beneath the village that horrible night.

Margot kept looking across the road at Joséphine and Beatrice’s window, but the curtain was drawn across. A couple of times, she thought she’d seen a pale face peeping out, only to suddenly disappear. She could have gone over there to see how they were, but she and Theo had decided they needed to keep their heads down for Isabelle’s sake.

She just had to hope that her friends had all got home safely, and were waiting it out just like she and Theo were.

Theo was down in the basement setting up the radio that he had concealed beneath the floorboards in his rooms. They needed it to find Daniel. He was out there somewhere and, with the radio, Theo had the best chance of finding him. Margot knew the risk she was taking by even having the radio in her home, but it was one of the weapons in the arsenal of the resistance.

‘Margot,’ Theo said as he emerged into the shop, dusting off his hands. ‘I wonder, when everything is a little bit more settled in the village, would you like to go for lunch? Not exactly Maxim’s on the ration, I know, but still my treat. To thank you for all you’ve done.’